Current commercially available lateral flow test kits are limited to answering yes/no questions such as those concerning pregnancy or influenza. These tests are enabled by a layer of porous material, typically nitrocellulose, which, when wetted with an analyte-containing liquid sample at one end, produces a flow to dry areas by capillary action [Mendez, S.; Fenton, E. M.; Gallegos, G. R.; Petsev, D. N.; Sibbett, S. S.; Stone, H. A.; Zhang, Y.; López, G. P. Langmuir 2010, 26, 1380-1385]. Initially, the flow brings analyte into contact with a patch of lyophilized dye-tagged antibodies (also known as reporter molecules), thereby producing dye-tagged analyte-antibody complexes. These complexes are swept along with the flow. Further downstream, they are brought into contact with a second patch of antibodies, these being immobilized on the nitrocellulose at a defined reaction zone. The complexes are captured by the immobilized antibodies. If enough analyte is present in the original sample, it accumulates at the reaction zone to an extent that dye-tag is perceptible to the human eye and interpreted as a positive result [U.S. Pat. No. 5,766,961]. Below a certain threshold of analyte concentration in the original sample, no line is perceived, and the result is interpreted to be negative. Advantages of these tests are that they are relatively simple to perform and interpret, and relatively inexpensive to fabricate. However, to obtain quantitative or even semi-quantitative results, more sophisticated instruments are employed, especially the high-volume in vitro diagnostic tools that are ubiquitous in clinical reference laboratories today. Many important tests are quantitative in nature, such as HIV viral loading, the extent of liver function damage, and measurements of environmental exposure, and these cannot be answered at present by commercially available lateral flow assays.